Liam
“YOU HAVE A BREAKFAST meeting at eight with Terry from Meditech—he’s interested in Tom’s new tech and wants to hear more. His assistant intimated that there might be a possibility for a big investment if he likes it.”
I could hear papers shuffling and the sound of typing on the other side of the phone line as my assistant outlined what the next day would look like for me.
Flipping the signal on, I slowed to wait for a car to move through the intersection before turning onto the next street. “I’m heading to Tom’s now to look at the prototype.”
“Great. You know how detail-oriented Terry is.”
From the way my assistant hesitated before emphasizing “detail-oriented,” I knew other choice words had floated into her head before she had chosen that specific one.
I swallowed a chuckle. “What else is going on tomorrow?”
“After your meeting, you have a call with the CEO of Sacramento Memorial to talk about your donation to the children’s hospital—”
“Right, about that,” I interrupted. “I’ve been thinking I want to add four more units.”
The typing and paper shuffling stopped, and silence descended on the line for a moment before I heard a prolonged intake of breath.
“That will take it up to six units, Liam,” she said, reproach clouding her voice.
“I can count, Gloria,” I chuckled again.
“Jordan isn’t going to be happy about this.” The reproach became a warning.
“I will work it out with Jordan. Don’t worry about it.” Gloria was right—my chief financial officer would be far more than “unhappy.” Livid was more like it. But I always found a way to work things out, even if it edged our poor CFO closer toward a breakdown in the process. At least, that’s what she always told me, her mouth a thin line, her eyes rolling toward the ceiling.
“It’s your company, Liam,” Gloria sighed.
It was a common refrain from my gray-haired assistant, and I grinned even though she couldn’t see me. I was sure she could see it in her head, though. It wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence.
“Yes, it is,” I agreed amiably.
A chuckle echoed across the line, begrudgingly given from the sound of it. But the typing and shuffling resumed.
“Anything else for tomorrow?” Another turn took me onto a tree-lined avenue of large, modern homes with grassy front yards, hints of large backyards thanks to side gates, and signs of families in the bikes lying abandoned by basketball hoops on the garage doors.
“A lunch meeting with
Miranda Paulson from Tree City Capital, and then a call with John Daily from Fresh Faces. They’re still looking for a venue for their fundraiser, but I think one of the high school kids in his program has an idea he thinks you might find interesting,” Gloria replied.
“Oh, great!” Of all my meetings, that was the one that had me most excited. Some of the kids from the program had gone on to do great things, and I couldn’t wait to hear what the director had to say. “You know, I think I might know of someone willing to donate a venue. I’ll send you their contact information when I get to Tom’s.”
“Sure thing, Liam.”
I clicked the turn signal a final time and pulled across the street and into the driveway of a large two-story with a stone-and-siding façade that was halfway to being a mansion.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“No, that’s it.”
I pushed the button to turn my car off and listened to the typing for a moment more.
“Gloria?”
Her distracted answer didn’t come immediately—she had already returned to work even if we hadn’t yet hung up. “Yes?”
“Go home. Eat dinner with Fred. We’ll all be working long hours when we launch the new product next month, so get it in now while you can.”
Another raspy chuckle. “Fred likes when I stay out of his hair. You know that.”
“Gloria—go. Home,” I repeated, enunciating each word. “I’ll call the building and have them turn off the power to your office if you don’t.”
“Oh, all right.” My assistant heaved a sigh. “I’ll log off in a few minutes.”
“You better keep your word.”
“I will. See you tomorrow, Liam.”
“See you tomorrow, Gloria.”
The smile on my face was one of fondness as I touched the button on the screen to disconnect the call. I didn’t want the older woman to work too hard, but I also didn’t know what I would do without Gloria. She kept me on schedule and on task when my absentmindedness and lack
of attention would have me fixated on a single piece of code for hours at a time. When I started my company, I’d missed several meetings with important investors for just that reason. With the possibility of failure hanging over my head, I’d immediately hired an assistant. And so it had been between Gloria and me ever since.
The front door opened just as I closed the car door, and a black-and-brown shape came barreling out of it at me. A German shepherd puppy, all awkward angles, baby fur, and floppy ears, jumped up and put his paws on my chest, his tongue lolling with a happy grin.
“Hey, Scout,” I laughed, scratching the puppy’s head.
“Scout! No!” The shout, too late to do much of anything, came from the guy running after the puppy.
The German shepherd flopped his head to the side to glance at his owner, but he didn’t move from his position. I had to gently replace his paws on o the ground as Tom grabbed hold of his collar.
“I see the training is going well.”
Tom rolled his eyes. “He’s too smart for his own good. He knows what he’s supposed to do and performs perfectly for the trainer. And then he gives me one look and does his own thing the rest of the time.”
I laughed and gave the puppy, more an adolescent now, another scratch on the head. “Good boy.”
“Annoying pain in the ass,” Tom groused.
Scout ran off as soon as we were in the house, though I didn’t know where to, and Tom sighed as he shut the door, sagging against it for a moment. “He’s driving me nuts.”
“Regret adopting him?” I asked, but I knew Tom, and he would never give an animal up.
Indeed, a small smile curved at his mouth as he straightened and pushed away from the door. “Nah. He drives me up the wall, but he’s my buddy.”
I smacked him on the shoulder. “Are you going to show me the prototype?”
“Do you have to ask?”
He didn’t, really. Thomas Kinnear and I had been best friends since elementary school, two odd kids who didn’t quite fit in and had somehow found one another. We had been through everything together, ups and downs, failures and triumphs, and I knew his house as well as I knew my own. I still followed Tom as he led me to the kitchen.
“I installed the pad here since families spend so much time here. I figured it was the best place to put it, although the fully functional product will have a portable touch screen.”
Tom indicated a tablet-like device on the counter of the island. A swipe brought the screen to life, and he flipped through the various displays.
“Here you have the monitor for each room—heart rate, oxygen level, status.”
I saw Tom and myself indicated on the screen, another presence flickering in and out of different rooms—Scout—but there was a fourth indicator, too. Before I could ask, Tom continued his presentation.
“I obviously haven’t been able to test its full capability personally, but it will monitor anyone in the house for abnormalities—erratic heartbeats, heart attacks, unusual activity that could be a seizure, oxygen levels dropping, and even falls or fainting episodes.”
Tom turned to me, an enormous grin on his face. “Reports for our prototypes have accuracy at 95 percent, and development thinks it can up that to 97 or 98 percent before our release next month.”
“Wow, Tom, that’s amazing.” And I truly meant it. I had seen the health monitoring system first on paper as a rough idea, then the tech aspects as it had passed to development and our engineers. And here it was, even better than I could have imagined. And it had all been Tom’s idea. I clapped him on the shoulder so hard he jerked forward, but his grin only grew. “Seriously, amazing. This is going to save so many lives.”
“Yeah, absolutely.” I was surprised to see a slight flush creeping over my oldest friend’s face.
“No watches to wear or charge up, no forgetting a device somewhere. Just constant monitoring and nearly-instant response from emergency.”
“Wow.” I shook my head. “This is revolutionary, man. Seriously.”
The flush grew brighter. “Yeah, well—”
Tom didn’t take compliments well, but he couldn’t find a way out of it this time.
“What about the instances of false readings?” I asked.
“About what you would expect. The team is working on the bugs,” Tom replied with a shrug. “There were a few times it caught falls by little kids, which we have to figure out to account for. Another one was for someone dancing.”
“Dancing?” My eyebrows rose. “Really?”
It was Tom’s turn to grin. “You would know. Your dancing looks more like a medical condition than what anyone would call ‘moves.’”
“Excuse me? I don’t think any girl in our high school prom could resist this.” I started my patented dance moves that had, I was sorry to say, done the exact opposite of attracting the opposite sex. But they had Tom laughing as much as they had that night eighteen years earlier.
He was wiping tears away when he finally shook his head. “I have a growler from the new brewery out in the fridge in the garage. I’ll get it while you get my laptop, and I’ll show you the results and the bugs.”
“Yeah, sure.”
I wound my way upstairs and to Tom’s spacious office that looked out over his even more spacious backyard. The door was open a crack, and it swung open when I pushed on it to step through...
...and stopped instantly.
A woman was leaning over Tom’s desk, her dark hair a curtain hiding her face as she studied a tablet on the surface before her, the black pencil skirt smoothed over curves. The floor creaked as I put my foot down, and she jerked up, the hair falling away to reveal a face that made my heart flutter in a way it never had before, her blue eyes settling on me, the full lips curving into a slight frown.
“Sorry,” I managed, caught by surprise, stuck between moving into the room and wanting to step right back out. I had entirely forgotten about the fourth presence in the house, but here it was—here she was—and I couldn’t look away.
I had no idea who she was. Thomas’s new girlfriend? He hadn’t mentioned anything to me. Then again, romance wasn’t entirely his thing. Maybe it was casual, and he was keeping it under wraps.
Whatever it was, I felt a pang of jealousy and had to swallow it away as I stepped farther into the room. Who was the woman? Even if she was Thomas’s girlfriend, I had a sudden urge to know.
Bailey
THOSE DAMN CURTAINS.
I stared up at them, hands on my hips, my toe tapping on the perfectly polished wooden floor—with which the curtains contrasted perfectly—marking a staccato rhythm.
“They’re too damn short.” The rhythm became a hard tap as I crossed the room one more time and knelt awkwardly in my pencil skirt, extending the tongue of the measuring tape. Just like the last two times I’d measured them, they were too short by a foot.
I wasn’t imagining things.
“I told them I wasn’t imagining things,” I muttered, though no one had said a thing, and no one else was in the room.
They had implied, of course, they being the textile company I had called to point out the mistake.
“We double-check our measurements,” the woman on the other side of the phone had insisted, her voice nasal and strident. “And we double-check them against the measurements our clients send. ...
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